One sees lots of criticism in the press and elsewhere about the deployment of 3G mobile systems. This paper (Word, PDF) by Audrey Selian of the ITU provides some good perspective on the historical development of GSM and how we are moving to IMT-2000 (3G) mobile systems. Not surprisingly, there were plenty of GSM naysayers in its early days, just as there are today for IMT-2000 systems.

From the myth-bashing department: Reason has an interview with Larry Lessig. In this interview, he repeats his arguments from his book, The Future of Ideas, concerning his views on the importance of the "end-to-end design principle", repeating a common mantra of Internet techies, who argue that the Internet is obviously a superior design to the telephone network because "the intelligence is at the end nodes and not inside the network". These theories are blindly parroted and even applied to cyber-political theory, typically as variations of David S. Isenberg's stupid network theme. Showing that the populist view often does not bear scrutiny, in this posting back in March 2000 on the Cybertelecom-L mailing list (no archives), Fred Goldstein takes the opposite view and argues convincingly, that on the contrary, "The telephone network has even more content-neutrality than the Internet, because as a circuit-switched network, it has zero visibility of the bearer channels. Once the call's set up, bits is bits. No firewalls, censorware, caches, or other content-invasive intermediaries a la the Internet as people tend to see it nowadays. Thus the amount of intelligence in the Internet's switches (routers) is many orders of magnitude above what goes into a telephone switch, even a huge one."

Every dial you take. The FBI is asking for more information about what you do on the phone, and no one is saying no. [Salon.com]. On a related note, remember that VeriSign recently announced the somewhat unusually-named NetDiscovery Service "enabling carriers to meet June 30 CALEA Deadline with Minimum Expense", taking "full advantage of VeriSign's core expertise in security and bridges our telecom, PKI, and IP network assets".

This Internet-draft from Neustar staff is a great primer on numbering portability in the Public/Global Switched Telephone Network (PSTN/GSTN). Service provider portability, meaning the ability to switch service providers and retain existing numbering resources, is an important component of any pro-competitive telecom market liberalization. The concepts behind number portability, preventing service lock-in, is what made the IAHC propose a similar model for the generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) marketplace back in 1996 (as well as the pioneering work of Nominet in the split registry/registrar model). As an original member of the IAHC who pushed for this, there are times, five years later, when I wonder whether the regulatory costs of mandating portability and overseeing a large number of competing registrars are worth it.

[New York Times: Technology]: Telecom Outlook: First the Bad News, Then the Bad News. In light of a wave of bad news last week, some analysts say the telecommunications industry's problems could become worse before they become better. "This confluence of negative news, combined with the languishing bankruptcy proceedings of Global Crossing and persistent concern over giants like WorldCom, have prompted some analysts to forecast a more severe crisis in the industry, which has already endured the erasing of an estimated $2 trillion in the market value of its constituent companies since the telecommunications slump began about two years ago."

U.N. Conference Says Digital Divide Still Growing. The digital divide between rich and poor countries is growing despite the many efforts to help developing nations break into the global economy via computers. "Some countries have prospered while others have fallen behind,'' said Yoshio Utsumi, Secretary-General of the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union. "If we do not take any action, the gap between the information 'haves' and 'have nots' will continue to grow.'' Utsumi said "information poverty'' remained a reality for much of the world. More than 80 countries had fewer than 10 telephone lines for every 100 inhabitants. And in three out of five countries, fewer than one out of 100 people used the Internet, he said. [New York Times: Technology]

The mobile operator O2 is launching the XDA, an integrated phone and PDA based on the Pocket PC operating system with support for General Packet Radio Service (GPRS). It's already available in the Netherlands according to Infosync. Infosync has an article on the XDA's Action Engine service framework which offers a browser-like interface to various operator services.

New Architect Magazine has a pessimistic editorial view on ENUM. "Of course, no matter what the preferences, marketers are bound to abuse the directory just as they have the phone book, the Whois database, and any other public list of contact information." This echoes similar comments made by INTUG on ENUM: "The success of ENUM... will rely on millions of individuals being willing and enthusiastic about entering their details and maintaining their accuracy. Central to this will be confidence in the security and privacy of the records. If, as might happen, they are the subject of identity theft, of yet more junk mail or are the basis for slamming, then the systems will quickly be brought into disrepute and fail."

an increasing number of mobile cellular operators are creating a separate tariff for the completion of international calls to their networks

these wholesale prices can be as much as 1500% more expensive than calls to a fixed network in the same country

the mobile operators are leveraging their domestic power in the call termination market into foreign markets for call origination

with the growing importance of mobile cellular networks, other operators have no alternative but to connect, even when they are unable to negotiate and must pay the price levied by the terminating network

consequently retail prices to foreign mobile networks can be higher by 10 to 30 cents (Euro or US) per minute

consumers are frequently unaware of these higher prices

even if consumers do know that a call will be at a higher price, they frequently have no obvious alternative

INTUG wishes to see the principle of cost orientation applied to the termination of calls on mobile cellular networks

INTUG also wishes to see signatories to the WTO GATS Reference Paper enforce implementation of their commitments to the interconnection of international calls to mobile cellular networks

Bret Fausett, who writes [icann.Blog], has written an insightful piece on what he would tell the US Congress if asked to testify in its hearings on ICANN on June 12, 2002. "The Internet's DNS is, and always will be, an international resource; if you try to nationalize it, it will slip through your fingers forever." The contrast with a stance reported today in Reuters "U.S. Should Control Internet Body, Senator Says" couldn't be more striking.

Wind-up calls without the stress: "The wind-up radio, invented by the UK's Trevor Baylis, has become an icon of benign technology. Beloved of environmentalists and design gurus alike, it has already shifted over 3m units worldwide. Now the company that bought the idea from Baylis has moved into the mobile phone market" This month, Freeplay will launch a wind-up mobile phone charger... [Guardian]

Slashdot is reporting in its article KPNQWest Admins Keep Bankrupt Network Running on how some dedicated staff are keeping the KPNQwest network running (but for how long?). See the earlier article on this: "KPNQwest Crisis and a lesson about Critical Network Infrastructure". Some of the NOC folks have got some web pages up to show they're doing their best.

Currently, IETF IESG has begun Last Call on the set of core documents IDNA+NAMEPREP+PUNYCODE of IDN WG, but the architecture of IDN defined in the above three documents does not solve the traditional and simplified Chinese character variant problem: it’s a half-baked solution for Chinese users. That will cause serious delegation problem in the application of Chinese Domain Name.

IETF IDN WG does not solve Chinese Domain Name technical problems. Under the current condition, if IETF approves these IDN drafts without publishing any complementary documents simultaneously, registrars will open Chinese Domain Name registration without considering the requirements of Chinese Domain Name and Chinese Domain Name will fall into confusion. This will damage Chinese Internet community seriously.

What’s more, it stands a good chance that software vendors will not deploy or modify client software to support IDN too, because the current so-called IDN solution is a defective solution, which will be widely against end users, administrators and Chinese Internet communities, and bring them into much trouble.

For those who don't understand this problem (called the TC/SC equivalence problem), here's a greatly simplified explanation. Some languages, like Chinese, have more than one script: for example, traditional Chinese (TC), which is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and simplified Chinese (SC), which is generally used in mainland China (although the Chinese also use the traditional script in some cases). Most Chinese can recognize the origin of the simplified script as it orginates in the traditional more cursive characters. It is argued by some that there should be an equivalence between Chinese domain names whether in traditional or simplified scripts and therefore they should resolve to the same entity. To understand the thoughts behind this argument, see this Internet draft.

NTT DoCoMo announced that it will begin selling the FOMA P2002 3G mobile phone equipped for DoCoMo's i-motion video clip distribution service on June 13, 2002. The i-motion service enables compatible FOMA handsets to download audio/video content at up to 384 Kbps (uplink at 64 Kbps) from sites accessed via DoCoMo's official portal. The model has a 2.2-inch, 65,536-color TFD LCD.

The rapid collapse of KPNQwest provides an interesting lesson vis-à-vis contingency planning of critical network infrastructure. Besides the large numbers of customers who'll be left stranded or scrambling for new providers, KPNQwest's infrastructure provided DNS services (secondaries through ns.eu.net*) for a number of Internet country code top level domains (ccTLDs). Those ccTLDs may need to rapidly find out whether they have enough distributed secondaries if ns.eu.net vanishes. Update: RIPE NCC has made an agreement with KPNQwest to temporarily take over the hosting of ns.eu.net.

This reminds me that less than a year ago there was a partial unavailability of one of the Internet's master root name servers, namely c.root-servers.net, located in PSInet's network infrastructure, when a large backbone provider, Cable & Wireless, disconnected PSINet's peering connections because they no longer met C&W’s requirements. The result was that C&W customers were unable to reach that root name server until the peering arrangement was reinstated.

Thousands of recently registered "dot-name" domains violate regulations governing the new Web addresses, according to a study released by Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center For Internet & Society. Also see the related article in the Washington Post.

The thrust of the working group's hotly debated approach is to maintain an underlying ASCII representation, based on using "Punycode": an encoding technique that uniquely and reversibly transforms Unicode (an encoding of the world's language scripts) into ASCII strings. For an overview on why this particular approach was taken and how it works, see the ITU's briefing paper from its December 2001 joint seminar with WIPO on multilingual domain names. It should be emphasized that even when a technical standard emerges, it will be the beginning of a very long process. In fact, the policy and coordination issues are likely to be even more daunting than the already contentious technical work. ICANN's IDN committee has produced a related discussion paper but I think if anything, they've greatly underestimated the issues that are likely to arise. Update: It didn't take long to confirm that last statement: see follow-up Chinese Domain Name Consortium Reject IETF Approach.

The Australian Communications Authority (ACA) is discussing the policy and regulatory issues related to the implementation of ENUM in Australia. A study group was established in Australia by the ACA to look at the implications and possibilities of ENUM in the Australian telecommunications environment. To that end, a meeting was held last week in Melbourne. In a recent article, Telstra's Geoff Huston's has given his views on ENUM.

For those of us who use both a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone, the Holy Grail is a single integrated device. I've always wondered which side of the market would drive convergence of devices. On the one hand, the Palm OS and Windows Pocket PC devices have slick intuitive user interfaces with thousands of applications. On the other hand, the market clout and distribution channels of the major mobile handset manufacturers (e.g., Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson) suggested they could eventually dominate. So I kept my eye out for the perfect personal device hoping that this would suggest which sector would eventually be in the driver's seat. When Ericsson released their R380 smartphone, based on the Symbian platform and an innovative new form factor, I thought this might be a winner. Ericsson kindly lent to me one of the first versions but I finally put it aside. Despite its definite coolness factor it was still too large to comfortably carry around, somewhat too fragile and the software crashed too often. Later, when Handspring announced their Treo communicator and I read some glowing reviews, I thought this might be my perfect device. However, after seeing and handling one I still wasn't convinced. Something still wasn't quite right.

I had noticed during my trips to Asia that handsets in those markets are small, beautifully made and often hang around necks on cords - they're more like fashion accessories than phones. Slowly, it's been dawning on me that the perfect personal device is more about form factor and quality than anything. Last year, I was in Stockholm and met with Göran Skyttval, Ericsson's Director of 2G and 3G Terminals and Applications. I explained to him the "quality" problems I had experienced with my R380 and we got onto the general topic of quality in manufacturing as well as specifically with respect to handsets. Interestingly, Göran had just come back from a stint in Japan where he was in charge of Ericsson's i-mode handset development for the Japanese market. Now anyone who has had to do business in Japan knows that the average Japanese consumer is very demanding about quality, packaging and design. In fact, many companies have had to completely redesign and repackage their products for the Japanese market. Göran discussed with me these Japanese concepts of quality and demonstrated subtle differences such as in the texture of materials. He explained how he was trying to introduce these higher standards into Ericsson's handset manufacturing. Subsequent to our meeting, Sony and Ericsson combined their handset manufacturing and marketing.

This is a round-about way to say that I think I've experienced directly the results of Göran's efforts. My latest personal device, the Sony Ericsson T39m, is beautifully made, synchronizes with my contact list and calendar in Outlook/Exchange, provides GSM tri-band support, has a POP3 email client, T9 predictive text input, Bluetooth, GPRS, a long-life battery, and best of all, it has a small and elegant form factor which just feels right. It fits in any pocket and really is the first device that I don't mind having with me anywhere, anytime. So the T39m has my vote as the current perfect personal device. Bravo to Ericsson.

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